Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Feng-Hsiung Hsu

Rui Gao

Xiong-Fei Cai

Ning-Yi Xu

Eyal Ofek

Chunhui Zhang

Xiongfei Cai

Lintao Zhang

Ningyi Xu

Bojun Huang

Mao Yang

Junyan Chen

Jing Yan

Feng Yan

Xiong-Fei (Bruce) Cai

Li-Wen (Magnetro) Chen

Zenglin Xia

Lang Zong

Mingjie Wang

Chunshui Zhao

Jiawei Gu

Shaopeng Song

Disclosed are systems and methods associated with a touch-sensitive input device including a plurality of keys, wherein each key of the plurality of keys includes at least one spring. Such a spring may include a substantially planar peak located at a central portion of the spring, a first substantially arcuate leg extending from the peak in a first direction, and a second substantially arcuate leg extending from the peak in a second direction substantially perpendicular to the first direction. In one embodiment, a resistive force provided by the at least one spring decreases after the peak travels a first distance from an initial position of the peak. In such an embodiment, the first distance is less than or equal to approximately &#x2155; of a range of travel of the peak.

Spring configuration for touch-sensitive input device

Disclosed are techniques and systems for distinguishing between inadvertent contact and an intentional key press on a touch-sensitive input device, such as a keyboard or other like peripheral. In some embodiments, a system may include a first electrode disposed in a first plane, and a second electrode disposed in a second plane substantially parallel to the first plane. The system may also include one of a flexible dielectric material and an air gap spacing the first electrode from the second electrode; and a third electrode disposed in a third plane substantially parallel to the first plane. The third electrode may extend substantially parallel to the first electrode, and may be spaced from the first electrode by the one of the flexible dielectric material and the air gap.

Multi-touch capacitive sensing surface

Computing devices are often designed in view of a particular usage scenario, but may be unsuitable for usage in other computing scenarios. For example, a notebook computer with a large display, an integrated keyboard, and a high-performance processor suitable for many computing tasks may be heavy, large, and power-inefficient; and a tablet lacking a keyboard and incorporating a low-powered processor may improve portability but may present inadequate performance for many tasks. Presented herein is a configuration of a computing device featuring a display unit with a resource-conserving processor that may be used independently (e.g., as a tablet), but that may be connected to a base unit featuring a resource-intensive processor. The operating system of the device may accordingly transition between a resource-intensive computing environment and a resource-conserving computing environment based on the connection with the base unit, thereby satisfying the dual roles of workstation and portable tablet device.

Detachable computer with variable performance computing environment

Display components (e.g., liquid crystal displays (LCDs)) are viewable at different viewing angles, for example, by a first user positioned directly in front of the display and by a second user positioned to one side of the display. Many displays present a consistent display across a wide range of viewing angles, but these displays may consume energy and/or compromise user privacy. Presented herein are configurations of backlights for display devices featuring an adjustable viewing angle, such that a user may select a narrower viewing angle in usage scenarios involving power consumption or privacy, and may select a wider viewing angle in usage scenarios involving plentiful power and fewer privacy concerns. Such configurations may include multiple banks of backlight lamps generating backlight at different viewing angles; an electrowetting electrode as an adjustable collimator; adjustable diffusers that may adjustably scatter light passing therethrough; and/or a combination of such adjustable elements.

Display backlights with adjustable narrow viewing angle

In general, a 'Flexible Mobile Display,' as described herein, provides various techniques for implementing a flexible display for mobile phones or other handheld or portable electronic or computing devices that, in various embodiments, is foldable and/or rollable. Consequently, the Flexible Mobile Display provides a large display in a small form factor that is user extensible. Advantageously, production of the Flexible Mobile Display uses an adaptation of various currently available production techniques and is expected to be relatively low cost to produce. Additionally, in various embodiments, the Flexible Mobile Display also includes a low cost touch or multi-touch sensing mechanism that can be easily integrated into the overall system.

Flexible mobile display

Systems, methods, and devices are described for implementing learning algorithms on data sets. A data set may be partitioned into a plurality of data partitions that may be distributed to two or more processors, such as a graphics processing unit. The data partitions may be processed in parallel by each of the processors to determine local counts associated with the data partitions. The local counts may then be aggregated to form a global count that reflects the local counts for the data set. The partitioning may be performed by a data partition algorithm and the processing and the aggregating may be performed by a parallel collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS) algorithm and/or a parallel collapsed variational Bayesian (CVB) algorithm. In addition, the CGS and/or the CVB algorithms may be associated with the data partition algorithm and may be parallelized to train a latent Dirichlet allocation model.

Parallel processing of data sets

Some implementations provide techniques and arrangements to receive image information. A plurality of reference fields of a user-manipulated device may be identified. Each reference field of the plurality of reference fields may include reference elements. The plurality of reference fields may be identified based on colors of the reference elements, shapes of the reference elements, and/or a pattern of the reference elements. Some implementations may generate position information based on the plurality of reference fields. The position information may identify a position of the user-manipulated device relative to the video camera. Some implementations may provide the position information to an application.

Generating position information using a video camera

Accelerator systems and methods are disclosed that utilize FPGA technology to achieve better parallelism and flexibility. The accelerator system may be used to implement a relevance-ranking algorithm, such as RankBoost, for a training process. The algorithm and related data structures may be organized to enable streaming data access and, thus, increase the training speed. The data may be compressed to enable the system and method to be operable with larger data sets. At least a portion of the approximated RankBoost algorithm may be implemented as a single instruction multiple data streams (SIMD) architecture with multiple processing engines (PEs) in the FPGA. Thus, large data sets can be loaded on memories associated with an FPGA to increase the speed of the relevance ranking algorithm.

Field-programmable gate array based accelerator system

Architecture that performs incremental computing for web searches by employing methods at least for storing the results of repeat queries on unchanged webpages and for computing results for the repeated queries. The architecture includes one or more algorithms for pre-computing query results on index servers, for only selectively choosing index servers whose result for a query change for a query computation process, and for re-using the unchanged web pages stored in the cache and computing results upon changed index and unchanged index separately.

Incremental computing for web search

A method using a RankBoost-based algorithm to automatically select features for further ranking model training is provided. The method reiteratively applies a set of ranking candidates to a training data set comprising a plurality of ranking objects having a known pairwise ranking order. Each round of iteration applies a weight distribution of ranking object pairs, yields a ranking result by each ranking candidate, identifies a favored ranking candidate for the round based on the ranking results, and updates the weight distribution to be used in next iteration round by increasing weights of ranking object pairs that are poorly ranked by the favored ranking candidate. The method then infers a target feature set from the favored ranking candidates identified in the iterations.

Automated feature selection based on rankboost for ranking

Motion-based control of an electronic device uses an array of at least three reference elements forming a triangle. An image sensor (e.g., a video camera), which may be located on a user-manipulated device, captures an image of the array. The array image has a pattern formed by a nonparallel projection of the reference triangle onto the image sensor. The pattern carries information of the relative position between the image sensor and the reference element array, and changes as the relative position changes. The pattern is identified and used for generating position information, which may express a multidimensional position of the user-manipulated device with respect to three axes describing a translational position, and three rotational axes describing pitch, roll and yaw motions. The control system and method are particularly suitable for videogames.

Multi-axis motion-based remote control

Architecture for decoding (demosaicing) a source image and performing reconstruction directly from the Bayer pattern to reduce memory size and improve communication bandwidth. The architecture can be easily implemented in hardware such as in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

Reconstruction of image in a Bayer pattern

Accelerator systems and methods are disclosed that utilize FPGA technology to achieve better parallelism and processing speed. A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is configured to have a hardware logic performing computations associated with a neural network training algorithm, especially a Web relevance ranking algorithm such as LambaRank. The training data is first processed and organized by a host computing device, and then streamed to the FPGA for direct access by the FPGA to perform high-bandwidth computation with increased training speed. Thus, large data sets such as that related to Web relevance ranking can be processed. The FPGA may include a processing element performing computations of a hidden layer of the neural network training algorithm. Parallel computing may be realized using a single instruction multiple data streams (SIMD) architecture with multiple arithmetic logic units in the FPGA.

Growing community of inventors

Cupertino, CA, United States of America

Feng-Hsiung Hsu